Django 1.5 Released

The Django developers have released version 1.5 of the popular open source Python web framework.

According to the announcement, the main new feature in this release is the configurable user model, which means applications using Django’s auth framework are no longer forced to use Django’s definition of a “user.” In Django 1.5, the user model can be replaced with a custom one.

Django 1.5 also includes Python 3 support. The developers say the Python support is “experimental” – because it has received little real-world testing. However, all items are in place to begin porting apps to Python 3. According to the release notes, Django 1.6 will support Python 3 without reservations. Note that Django continues to support Python 2; however, the minimum version for Django 1.5 is Python 2.6.5, and Python 2.7.3 or newer is strongly recommended.

With this release, Django’s documentation also has been improved; specifically, the main documentation page has been reworked for ease of use, existing tutorials have been updated, and several new tutorials have been added. Other new technical features in Django 1.5 include support for saving a subset of a model’s fields and improved support for streaming responses via the new response class, StreamingHttpResponse. Django 1.5 is released under the BSD license.